FILE -- Elie Wiesel, the Holocaust survivor, author and Nobel Peace Prize laureate, at home in New York, March 29, 1981. Wiesel, whose writings including ONightO did as much as anyone to sear the memory of the Holocaust on the worldOs conscience, died at home in Manhattan on July 2, 2016. He was 87. (Jim Wilson/The New York Times) ORG XMIT: XNYT74 less

FILE -- Elie Wiesel, the Holocaust survivor, author and Nobel Peace Prize laureate, at home in New York, March 29, 1981. Wiesel, whose writings including ONightO did as much as anyone to sear the memory of the ... more

Photo: JIM WILSON

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FILE -- President Barack Obama and Elie Wiesel, the author and Nobel Peace Prize laureate, embrace at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, April 23, 2012. Wiesel, the survivor whose writings including ONightO did as much as anyone to sear the memory of the Holocaust on the worldOs conscience, died at home in Manhattan on July 2, 2016. He was 87. (Stephen Crowley/The New York Times) ORG XMIT: XNYT78 less

FILE -- President Barack Obama and Elie Wiesel, the author and Nobel Peace Prize laureate, embrace at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, April 23, 2012. Wiesel, the survivor whose ... more

Photo: STEPHEN CROWLEY

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Elie Wiesel, Holocaust survivor, author, Nobel winner, dead at 87

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New York

Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel, the Romanian-born Holocaust survivor whose classic "Night" became a landmark testament to the Nazis' crimes and launched Wiesel's long career as one of the world's foremost witnesses and humanitarians, has died at age 87.

His death was announced Saturday by Israel's Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial. No other details were immediately available.

The short, sad-eyed Wiesel, his face an ongoing reminder of one man's endurance of a shattering past, summed up his mission in 1986 when accepting the Nobel Peace Prize: "Whenever and wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation, take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented."

For more than a half-century, he voiced his passionate beliefs to world leaders, celebrities and general audiences in the name of victims of violence and oppression. He wrote more than 40 books, but his most influential by far was "Night," a classic ranked with Anne Frank's diary as standard reading about the Holocaust.

"Night" was his first book, and its journey to publication crossed both time and language. It began in the mid-1950s as an 800-page story in Yiddish, was trimmed to under 300 pages for an edition released in Argentina, cut again to under 200 pages for the French market and finally published in the United States, in 1960, at just over 100 pages.

"'Night' is the most devastating account of the Holocaust that I have ever read," wrote Ruth Franklin, a literary critic and author of "A Thousand Darknesses," a study of Holocaust literature that was published in 2010.

"There are no epiphanies in 'Night.' There is no extraneous detail, no analysis, no speculation. There is only a story: Eliezer's account of what happened, spoken in his voice."

Wiesel began working on "Night" just a decade after the end of World War II, when memories were too raw for many survivors to even try telling their stories. Frank's diary had been an accidental success, a book discovered after her death, and its entries end before Frank and her family were captured and deported. Wiesel's book was among the first popular accounts written by a witness to the very worst, and it documented what Frank could hardly have imagined.

"Night" was so bleak that publishers doubted it would appeal to readers. In a 2002 interview with the Chicago Tribune, Wiesel recalled that the book attracted little notice at first. "The English translation came out in 1960, and the first printing was 3,000 copies. And it took three years to sell them. Now, I get 100 letters a month from children about the book. And there are many, many million copies in print."

In one especially haunting passage, Wiesel sums up his feelings upon arrival in Auschwitz:

"Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, which has turned my life into one long night, seven times cursed and seven times sealed. Never shall I forget that smoke. Never shall I forget the little faces of the children, whose bodies I saw turned into wreaths of smoke beneath a silent blue sky. ... Never shall I forget these things, even if I am condemned to live as long as God Himself. Never."

"Night" was based directly on his experiences, but structured like a novel, leading to an ongoing debate over how to categorize it. Alfred Kazin was among the critics who expressed early doubts about the book's accuracy, doubts that Wiesel denounced as "a mortal sin in the historical sense." Wiesel's publisher called the book a memoir even as some reviewers called it fiction. An Amazon editorial review labeled the book "technically a novel," albeit so close to Wiesel's life that "it's generally — and not inaccurately — read as an autobiography."

Wiesel's prolific stream of speeches, essays and books, including two sequels to "Night" and more than 40 books overall of fiction and nonfiction, emerged from the helplessness of a teenager deported from Hungary, which had annexed his native Romanian town of Sighet, to Auschwitz. Tattooed with the number A-7713, he was freed in 1945 — but only after his mother, father and one sister had all died in Nazi camps. Two other sisters survived.

After the liberation of Buchenwald, in April 1945, Wiesel spent a few years in a French orphanage, then landed in Paris. He studied literature and philosophy at the Sorbonne, and then became a journalist, writing for the French newspaper L'Arche and Israel's Yediot Ahronot.

French author Francois Mauriac, winner of the 1952 Nobel in literature, encouraged Wiesel to break his vowed silence about the concentration camps and start sharing his experiences.

Among his most memorable spoken words came in 1985, when he received a Congressional Gold Medal from President Ronald Reagan and asked the president not to make a planned trip to a cemetery in Germany that contained graves of Adolf Hitler's personal guards.

"We have met four or five times, and each time I came away enriched, for I know of your commitment to humanity," Wiesel said, as Reagan looked on. "May I, Mr. President, if it's possible at all, implore you to do something else, to find a way, to find another way, another site. That place, Mr. President, is not your place. Your place is with the victims."